The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has accused utility service providers of unjustifiably overcharging in several Russian regions. As it turned out, the bill is in the billions.
The agency issued a statement that in the Novosibirsk region, utilities unreasonably forced consumers to pay for water, electricity, heat and waste disposal at inflated rates. As a result of the audit, the FAS ordered the Novosibirsk Region regulator to exclude expenses of 1.1 billion rubles from tariffs.
“Thus, when calculating the planned level of electric energy losses, the regulator determined the volume indicators taking into account the previously achieved savings in electricity losses, which led to economically unjustified revenue,” the federal service said in a statement.
In the field of water supply and sanitation, excessive expenses were included in the “depreciation” line, while the money received for this was not used to finance the investment program.
And the main pipelines of the heating network are tearing up all over the country, and heat consumers are paying for all this. The event was significant, if not fateful for the country. Tariffs for public utilities have been growing every year and on a significant scale, federal authorities – deputies and even ministers openly admitted that they were frankly overstated, that the population was repeatedly overpaying utilities for their “services”, as a result, the debt of citizens exceeded trillions of rubles. But all the statements on this topic remained just a shaking of the air. The utilities were “protected” by the regional authorities, they also approved insane rates in bills, and sometimes officials in Moscow referred to this: they say, “nothing can be done about it.” Although competent experts explicitly stated that without the active support of the federals, the regionals would never have decided on trillion-dollar adventures.
By the end of 2024, the total amount of identified overstatement of tariffs for housing and communal services exceeded 11 billion rubles, and in 2023, the Federal Antimonopoly Service ordered the exclusion of 23 billion economically unjustified funds from tariffs. And all this money was taken out of the pockets of the citizens! The leaders in the number of financial violations were the Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk Territories, the Republic of Buryatia and the Leningrad Region.
In short, a precedent has been set, and the process of exposing communal theft has begun. Of course, there will be those who want to prevent this, which cannot be allowed!
Lavrenty Pavlov
Photo: Pixabay.com
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